Epyx FastLoad
The Epyx FastLoad is a floppy disk fast loader cartridge made by American software company Epyx in the early 1980s, for the Commodore 64 (C64) home computer. Released in 1984, it wasn't the first commercial fast loader for the C64, but it was the first one to gain widespread use. The FastLoad allowed software for the C64 to load into the computer from the Commodore 1541 disk drive roughly five times faster than without the cartridge. It quickly became a very popular peripheral for the hottest selling 8-bit home computer. The FastLoad's firmware program also included a disk editor which displayed raw data from floppy disks in classical HEX-ASCII split screen mode. Users with knowledge of the 1541's disk format could use it to repair damaged files, restore deleted files, or make changes to software. Another feature of the FastLoad was a so-called disk wedge: a collection of practical one-or-two-character shortcut commands to access the disk — performing tasks such as loading, saving, and copying files, and formatting disks (some of those commands were notoriously cumbersome in the native mode of Commodore DOS). In the uncommon case that a software program wouldn't work with the FastLoad, the cartridge could be totally switched out of operation via a menu command, thus avoiding the need to physically remove and reinsert the cartridge. The overall quality and transparency of this peripheral made it so easy to use and unobtrusive that many users left the cartridge in continously, never removing it from their C64 in the entire lifetime of the machine.
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